New camera software allows you to line up your photos with the past

One of the many joys of old photography is in comparing a vintage snapshot with the world today and juxtaposing the contrasts. An antique storefront here is peeled away, a long dilapidated cinema comes to life before your eyes.

Computational rephotography is basically technology that allows you to make that juxtaposition: you take a photo from the exact same location and viewpoint as an old photograph. There’s even a Flickr tag for computational rephotography, so it’s plenty popular.

Computational rephotography is about to get a technological leg up, thanks to researchers at MIT, who have figured out how to automate the process. Essentially, you hook your camera up to a laptop and go to a location roughly in the same spot as the scene you want to recapture; the software then tells you which way to turn, whether or not to angle your camera up or down, and so on until your picture exactly matches the original.

Pretty neat. Even neater is that the software being used could easily work on any digicam. My guess is we’ll see this on our Samsung and Canon point-and-shoots soon enough: camera makers already mainly differentiate themselves from the competition through software, so a built-in computational rephotography setting is only a matter of time.